The Presbyterian Pendulum

Seeing Providence in the Wild Diversity of the Church

Englund-Krieger

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781498272186
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Presbyterian Pendulum is a study in mainline Protestant social ethics with a focus on the Presbyterian Church (USA). This book is written for the church with the hope that it will provide theological foundation and spiritual encouragement for our efforts to find unity despite the diversity of convictions and perspectives in our midst. This is a historical study of the significant social and political issues to which the church responded throughout the twentieth century. With a foundation in solid historical research, this book offers the compelling thesis that the Presbyterian Church is at its best when the wild diversity of worldviews, theological perspectives, and convictions are encouraged. Even more, the book offers the spiritually rich thesis that it is in this wild diversity, not despite of it, that the providence of God is seen and known. What is unique and compelling about this study is the guiding metaphor of the pendulum swinging. The vast difference of opinion in the church around social issues has historically always been true, is necessary today, and itself points to a deeper truth about God's sustaining providence. The church must discern and hold onto that deeper truth. We must let the pendulum swing. It is my hope that this book will be an encouragement for the church even as we continue to be mired in deep conflict.

1

The Social Gospel Movement

As the twentieth century dawned, the social gospel movement1 pushed the pendulum in the Protestant churches. This movement lengthened the swing between different theological perspectives. The length of the pendulum’s swing, that is to say the distance between the theological poles in the Protestant mainline, has never diminished in the century since the advent of social gospel movement. The American tradition of evangelical Christianity, which focused on the salvation of individual souls for Jesus was now counterbalanced with a bright, social Christianity. Within the Presbyterian Church we will see these opposite viewpoints in the ministry of Charles Stelzle and Charles Erdman. The social gospel was influential primarily in the old mainline denominations, whose dominance was in those places where the Industrial Revolution was changing everything. The proclamation of the social gospel was loudest in the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregational denominations. Individual salvation was not the focus of this revolutionary movement. The social gospel advocates preached about Christianizing society, addressing social concerns, redeeming economic practices, and ushering in the kingdom of God.

Most important for our concern is that this movement brought a wider, broader, more comprehensive message into the churches. Now, clearly, the churches included a richer diversity. Opposite ends of the theological pendulum seemed contradictory. As the twentieth century dawned, the need for Christians to perceive the deeper message to which the wild swinging pendulum pointed was essential. The church struggled to hold itself together against centrifugal forces wanting to pull it apart. Possibly this is a struggle that could describe any era in Christian history. But we will see that this struggle for unity, the desire to see the providence in all the diversity is a special concern of twentieth-century American Protestantism. Prayerfully, the better vision provided by our hindsight and historical reflection will make the fight for unity a bit easier for us at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

The Social Gospel Movement

From the perspective of an ordinary middle-class lifestyle in twenty-first-century America, we can scarcely imagine the daily life and working conditions that existed in the first decade of the twentieth century for many Americans. For example, imagine Maureen, a young Irish American girl. She began work at the age of fourteen in a wool mill in Massachusetts. Beginning at six o’clock each morning except Sunday, she worked the machines until evening. For this fifty-six-hour week, Maureen was paid three dollars and fifty cents, ten cents of which was deducted for polluted drinking water. While she was working Maureen saw many older workers seriously injured by the mill machinery, because they were forced to work so fast. Maureen and her family, who left Ireland to escape famine, lived in a one-room boarding house. Lunch and supper consisted of black bread, molasses, and beans. On Sunday they might have a piece of meat with their meal.2 Whether she knew it or not, Maureen’s life was the focus of the social gospel. These social reforming Christians considered the conditions of Maureen and a whole class of people like her to be unjust and oppressive. Soon a loud voice within the Protestant churches was on her side.

Although children like Maureen may not have been aware of it, she was living through a time of deep change. Massive social changes were sweeping across America, eroding the Victorian culture of the nineteenth century as the calendar changed to the twentieth century. A modern, industrialized, bureaucratized, urban economy was emerging. A massive flow of immigrants, like Maureen’s family, provided a constant supply of industrial workers. Their strong backs were necessary to feed the hungry engine of the Industrial Revolution. Immigrants swelled the population of the cities, diluting the Protestant dominance in America. The opposition of labor and management became a crucial aspect of the new economy. Labor leaders wanted reform, stronger unions, and economic justice. Business owners kept an eye on the bottom line. The threat of severe conflict, including episodic violence, kept each side at bay. Occasionally the violence exploded, as in the Haymarket Square Riot in 1886 or the Pullman Strike in 1894.3 Rural communities and agricultural economic patterns rooted in small family farms also changed quickly. Soon family farmers were dependent on the movement of supply and demand determined in the exchanges of Chicago.

More than economic patterns were being transformed. Culturally, the Protestant and Victorian ethos of the nineteenth century was being overwhelmed from several directions. The importing of German higher criticism was challenging established norms for understanding the Bible. Darwin’s theory of evolution and Freud’s psychology were direct affronts to many Protestant convictions. The social gospel movement emerged in response to these tremendous changes in the decades immediately before and after 1900.

The social gospel movement was the religious, primarily Protestant, expression of the larger progressive thrust in American politics. Leaders in the Progressive movement demanded that the government do more. They insisted the government should be the crucial agent for social reform. Social gospel leaders focused on the social role of the church, demanding Christian social responsibility.4 Theologically, the social gospel changed the way many Christians thought about their faith. In place of an otherworldly emphasis on individual salvation, social gospel leaders insisted that salvation was a social matter.5 This theological argument for the social character of sin and salvation required a new understanding of the church and its mission. Mission was directed at whole communities, not simply individual conversions. The Industrial Revolution and concern for the people who lived in the cities were key ingredients that sparked the rise of the social gospel.6 But soon, as we will see, the new themes of the social gospel and the older, traditional evangelical Protestantism clashed. The Protestant denominations were not yet spiritually large enough for these different perspectives on the Christian faith to coexist within the same institutions. Now a century later, we must ponder if our churches have yet achieved such a spiritual maturity.

Walter Rauschenbusch: Theologian of the Social Gospel

The social gospel movement emerged, blossomed, and pervaded the culture and ethos of the Protestant mainline through the voice of a number of gifted Christian leaders. Washington Gladden (1836–1918) was one of the first preachers to acquire a national reputation for his gift in articulating social gospel themes from his pulpit in a Congregational church in Cleveland. From the mainline Methodist tradition, Frank Mason North (1850–1935) emerged as a leading social gospel advocate who worked to establish these themes within the church bureaucracies. From 1916 to 1920, he served as president of the Federal Council of Churches, which became a strong ecumenical institution motivated by social gospel themes.

Across all the different denominations that began to consider and include the social gospel movement in their life and ministry, no one Christian leader was more influential than Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918). He served as the pastor of the Second German Baptist Church in New York City from 1886 to 1897. During this pastoral ministry his commitment to the social gospel became visceral. He saw in the lives of his parishioners the transformation that the Industrial Revolution was causing in their city. He understood the economic burdens that this new economy was piling on the backs of the working people. He understood the deep division between labor and management. But more than anything else, in the midst of this massive social transformation that he experienced up close through the lives of his congregation in the burgeoning New York City, he saw the hope of creating a just society. For Rauschenbusch the social commitments of Christianity—a concern with public welfare, economic justice, and the movements of the social order—were clear foundational themes in the gospel itself. This was a sunny faith, which anticipated the slow, complete progress and improvement of human society toward the fulfillment of the kingdom of God on earth when all injustice would be cast out. Naming and articulating the hopeful theological vision of the social gospel became Rauschenbusch’s life work. He expressed his theological commitments with the same optimistic, hopeful tone as the larger progressive vision for the American political order. He left his congregation to become a professor of church history at Rochester Theological Seminary where he served for the remainder of his life, from 1897 to 1918. From his academic position Rauschenbusch was prolific and soon became one of the most influential American theologians.

Later critics of the social gospel and of Rauschenbusch specifically would lift his hopeful vision as the key and cornerstone of their criticism. This hope, from the perspective of later eras, was naive and utopian. The social gospel’s sunny assumptions, which Rauschenbusch articulated beautifully, were later held up for scorn. Such assumptions, later critics railed, did not understand the depth of human sin or the power of self interest. Later generations, in the light of severe economic collapse ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: Foucault’s Church: Watching the Pendulum
• Chapter 1: The Social Gospel Movement
• Chapter 2: The Churches Respond to World War I
• Chapter 3: The Churches in Support of Prohibition
• Chapter 4: The Fundamentalist and Modernist Controversy
• Chapter 5: The Conflict at Princeton Theological Seminary
• Chapter 6: The Churches Respond to World War II
• Chapter 7: Debate at the World Council of Churches
• Chapter 8: Women in Ministry
• Chapter 9: The Theology of The Book of Confessions
• Chapter 10: Movements of Power: The Sanctuary Movement and Peacemaking
• Chapter 11: Homosexuality and Ordination
• Conclusion: Avoiding Gimbal Lock
• Bibliography